


Death Walks Behind You

by Shoedonym



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, It's about the plague but you know nothing graphic, Minor Character Death, Orphanage AU, Plague AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-12
Updated: 2016-09-12
Packaged: 2018-08-14 15:40:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8019622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shoedonym/pseuds/Shoedonym
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The pestilence was a curse, the quarantine was condemnation, but it was the way that the sickness burst through the doors of the orphanage – the only place that she had ever called home – that really changed Emma’s life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Death Walks Behind You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seastarved](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seastarved/gifts).



Emma thought it would be impossible to predict whether the first day or the last would be the worst.

One was laden in chaos – the scrambling of families and children, the begging and pleading as at the crack of almost dawn soldiers came to their streets. They came with wooden barriers, several men high and who knew how thick, dragged and lodged into place in amongst violent protests, swords snagging anyone who tried to get through. Emma watched it all as though it were happening in slow motion; people moved slowly in the shock of it, movements playing catch up to their thoughts, too distracted with the sinking of their stomachs.

They were still blinking away sleep.

And it was loud. The shouts and cries so loud and desperate that it all became white noise, too much blaring in her ears to handle.

They came with death warrants, disguised as planks of wood.

It was a quarantine.

The word was almost as quick to say as it was to enact, almost as quick to enact as it was to understand.

Nothing was quicker than the panic and the way dread took up residence.

Emma had heard of it happening throughout the country, sometimes entire villages condemned and confined at the first sign of pallor skin. The King was risking nothing, nothing but the lives of those he shut behind thick, unhappy, towering walls. And when the clergyman’s wife four doors down collapsed in a pale sweat, the fourth person in a week, their fates had been sealed.

Literally.

She wasn’t the first to fall, the first to die at the hands of the disease, that invisible thing pulling the hearts from those both alive and dead (Emma knew too well who else had fallen), nor would she be the last – but she had been the final straw, apparently.

And in all honesty, Emma had thought it would have happened earlier – docks, ports and seaside villages seemed to be the most common to be shut down, worried that sickness would come across the waves with their boats and then chartered off elsewhere. Their small part of town on the very outskirts, was a seemingly unimportant port to the city, largely one that traded itself with other smaller towns and villages. They were certainly not a centre of trade, not important enough to draw the attention of many dignitaries, and likewise pirates were a rare sighting.

They were no ones (just like Emma herself).

Still, the King’s men took their boats from their harbour.

The first day was laden in chaos – the other?

\---

It took a week for the initial panic to wear off, and for the real worries to start. A week of indignant outcry, meetings where people complained ad nauseam about the sense it didn’t make, the barbarity to which they had been condemned, scared dissonance.

And although the anger was still there, the initial hysteria had resigned itself to a morbid sort of acceptance – people got on with their lives, the children went to school, people went to work, the docks lay empty.

(And Lady Mills’ husband took ill.)

And then they ran out of strawberries.

It was such a simple thing, a non-essential sort of fruit, and even though they were nearing the end of their Summer season, the ripe red berries signified something else – their food was in limited supply.

They were more securely stocked in other items like grains and barleys, but the fruits were largely a sign that their part of town, no matter how far out on the outskirts had no arable land, the sea and the city their main sources of food. They couldn’t live on fish alone forever.

Sources they were now cut off from.

Emma had only been passing through the Saturday markets when it happened, a bell still tolling over the walls of their trap, the baker’s granddaughter baffled and causing a scene by not saying anything at all. She didn’t need to. The old man at the stall had said it all.

They were going to run out of food.

(And the butcher’s uncle died.)

\---

It was cruel really, the way that when the food began to dwindle, the pestilence began to spread and take its place, like an empty seat at an unwanted table.

Crueller still, was the way it burst through the doors of the orphanage without enough warning.

Emma had lived and worked within its walls her whole life. (Though she’d rarely loved inside it). Initially she cursed the place, hating the daily reminder that she was alone in the world and uncomfortably unwanted – but as she grew older, and certainly now at the age of twenty-eight, she saw it for what it was: the one place that would have her.

And truly, she had wanted to get out, but there were limited options for a woman in her position. She could take to the cloth, take to the streets, or take to the beds of whoever was willing to pay her for it. Emma experimented with the second, and had tried option number four, as well – ‘marriage’ – but never got very far, always found herself back within the orphanage’s walls, never far enough to get a ring on her finger.

So, it became a reluctant kind of home, albeit a consistent one that welcomed her back each time with a patient hand and a kitchen apron. It was the Nolans who welcomed her back ever time, the old couple who somewhere along the way became something akin to carers (though never quite guardians), and not just those willing to help. And Emma developed an acquired liking for the children inside, finally managing to distance herself enough from their familiar plight to help them.

Henry was the rare exception.

The orphanage betrayed her now.

It may have been Nicholas who had fallen ill, but it was Ava his sister who had cried through the night. She tried to do it as silently as she could, but her sniffling was audible enough from Emma’s room, tiny fumblings of air sounding through the walls.

He lasted as long as he could, even if it was only three days.

The next morning they walked towards the churchyard, behind the puffy eyes of their mistress Mrs Nolan, in the wake of a very small coffin, their hearts in their throats, and the entire town watching.

The responses from their quarantine comrades were mixed. For the most part, people were sympathetic, empathetic, compassionate – one of any number of emotional apologies for the small child they had lost.

Some looked on with indifference.

Emma couldn’t find it in her heart to hate those that did, the scene too common, the scene too familiar. They were beginning to drop like flies, they were hungry, and the initial terrifying noise in their small part of the world was becoming a longed for thing, far preferable to the silence of death; a sour grape better than no grape at all.

(She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had grapes.)

The only pair of eyes in the crowd she made contact with were blue, and familiar, but she ignored them, turning her attentions to the small boy beside her, linking her fingers with Henry’s.

(And the carpenter’s son died.)

\---

He wasn’t the person in town with the worst reputation, but it was a close thing.

Dishonourably discharged, both he and his brother, and with more nefarious connections than a pirate himself. Yet, they allowed him within the doors of the orphanage whenever he wanted.

The Nolans told her why one night, long before the quarantine, warm mugs of honeyed wine in their hands, a house full of resting children. They tell her that he too was once an orphan, not from here – not from anywhere near here – but both he and his brother had dropped by one day, a basket filled with strange sausages, apples, and stranger words – “an orphan’s an orphan”.

Emma let the Jones’ come and go as they pleased at first, ignoring them and going about her business, curtseying a little where it was polite.

But in the end she couldn’t hold her tongue against the twist of his eyebrow, snarking at him a little and returning smirks with admonitions of her own, both verbal and otherwise. He was too much of a rogue for her to pretend otherwise, barely ever greeting him properly.

He was more bark than he was bite, more unruly puppy than hound, and still she worried about just what he was thinking and seeing when he lingered too long in the kitchen doorframe, his favoured location.

( _“You could help rather than just stand there loitering, you know” “Lass, it’s far more entertaining to watch you, and the view is considerably preferable from here.”_ )

Killian Jones didn’t have the worst reputation in town, but it was a close thing. The flirtatious looks that he would give her, not caring whose presence they were in, were ill-received by Emma. She knew what they, the town, said about him, and how he chose to spend his spare time in between the legs of more easily persuaded women. Only in part did his reputation hurt him in her eyes – she wasn’t so easily sold on tell-tale and gossip – it was more that Emma had experience with men like him.

(And no intention of expanding upon that knowledge.)

Her unimpressed, open-eyed glares did nothing but make him chuckle each time, sweeping dramatically into a bow as he left her, most often winking with those familiar blue eyes and ignoring the roll of his brother’s.

When he came that afternoon it was without several things – without food, without mirth, without his brother.

(The pestilence had stripped those from many.)

He followed her wordlessly through the house to the kitchen, his boots contributing to the loud noise around them. The upstairs of the house had been reserved for those who had fallen sick, mattresses and bedding shuffled from room to room, fitting whoever they could into appropriate spaces.

There were three young ones in the room upstairs. Three too many.

The downstairs of the house in contrast was loud, children shoved into new places with new people, the horror of the day, the week, the month better ignored with discussions about little things like dragons and knights, krakens and pirates, and the possibility of what was for dinner.

The upstairs of the house was a different story entirely.

And Emma had no time to fear that she too would get sick, she had no time nor the will to fear that caring for anyone would make her catch the pestilence.

(She hadn’t slept in her own room in a week.)

“Look, I don’t have time for whatever this visit of yours is supposed to be.”

The kitchen door nearly slams behind Emma as she makes her way towards the fireplace, throwing her hair back over her shoulders and trying to figure out just how thinly she can dilute that night’s broth.

(They are running out of food.)

“It’s not a time for pleasantries either, so it would seem.”

“Please, you’re not a gentleman, there’s no point in us pretending that you are.”

She’s impatient and she’s tired, and if a side of his usual banter is what he’s come for, he will be sorely disappointed to find he won’t get it.

“I’m always a gentleman.”

His replies come quickly enough, a gentle rumble to her ears, but it doesn’t hold any of his usual cadence – no joy, no banter. Emma turns back to him, banging the ladle in her hand a few times on the side of the pot before throwing it back on the table to stare at him.

She hadn’t really seen it when she’d opened the door to him, but he looks thinner, not just from a leaner quarantine diet, but there’s less confidence in him and he looks out of place all of a sudden. The dark brown coat he always wears usually gave him a larger presence, its collars high and cuffs a little elaborate. Now he just looks tired and standing in her kitchen with none of the swagger he usually bears.

His eyes, however, are as piercing as always.

“How many?”

Emma sighs at his question, hands finding her hips, voice finding its warmth.

“One. So far.”

He nods just once, looking away to watch the sad excuse for soup bubble between them. It is so unlike him, everything about this man in front of her is unlike what she’s come to know. He’s hollow, he’s awkward. Emma struggles with it, watching the way his line of sight remains fixed on her sorry excuse for cooking. Something in her heart churns at the way he stands, fiddling with nothing at all, hands clenched by his sides, unsure of himself – and then it clicks.

“And you?” She asks the question with a whisper of apprehension.

His head twitches only a little to look back at her, something like surprise and compassion in his features, everything like raw discomfort.

“Just the one,” he mutters back, before continuing to glare at the fire and continuing his train of thought. “I’d say your cooking is improving, love.”

His words are all mirthful intentions and no follow through.

“The only thing that’s improving is my ability to lie and bend the definition of food.”

“Necessity is the mother of invention, I suppose.”

The words are said as though thoughts between his teeth, and with an uncomfortably blatant look, a look that she feels in the pit of her stomach.

A feeling she blames on hunger.

Killian doesn’t stay for dinner.

\---

It’s been two weeks since Emma slept in her own room.

She sleeps against the wall upstairs every night instead, in the room full of dying children.

There’s a draft of air that seems to run along the floor no matter how close to the fire she gets, and she’d like to say it whistles, but it’s nothing so loud as that. But there is something there, an intangible whisper that drifts along the floorboards.

Moving, but not picking up dust.

Still, Emma sleeps there. Some nights she drifts, holding one small hand, other times a damp cloth, a glass of water, an increasingly stale lump of bread. It’s not much, and each night she knows she should fear catching whatever it is that they have. But the room upstairs, now with several matrasses on the floor, has become a grim and foreboding room, much more than it ever was.

The room has seen seven small children come, and three go, and the walls seem a sadder colour for it.

She hopes in some small part that sleeping up there with them will show them they should not be afraid, because Emma is not afraid to be near them.

(Emma is terribly afraid, and of many things, but not of them.

Well, not in that way.)

It used to be the sunniest room in the house, the most sought after by the children. It faced North and faced the harbour, getting with it sea breezes and light all year round. Now the sunlight is a cruel trick, the heat something they feel too much of with their soaring temperatures. It is all heat, and no warmth, especially not to the four young things inside it that are restless with fever.

It is as though the walls take all the light, and leave none for the children.

She’s not comfortable falling asleep with her back against the wall, not even a little, and most mornings she wakes up fully curled upon the blanket she’d dragged out to sit on, a crick in every limb she owns and tangles in the blonde hair she rarely ties back.

One morning she wakes, and it’s warmer than usual – one of the last of Summer’s warm days dawning – the morning light doing more than chasing away the night.

But it’s also the morning Emma wakes to find little Ana’s hand cold and stiff between her own.

She stops holding their hands while she sleeps.

(And the harbourmaster’s father dies.)

\---

She’s not the only one intent on making what she can of the bad situation.

Mrs Nolan is an almost irritating ray of sunshine whose optimism she cannot understand, giving little speeches about hope and faith that goes in one ear and out the other.

Henry is almost just as bad.

His small smile and his deep brown eyes follow her around every room, just as they always have, but it’s almost as if he thinks he’s taking care of her while she tries to take care of them.

Emma shouldn’t let him, especially when he starts sleeping upstairs with her curled against her side, should try and distance him as much as she can from… well, everything. But he is as stubborn as she is (something to do with nurture versus nature, she’s sure of it) and refuses to go back downstairs, believing that him there with her is doing some good.

(Even if he won’t stop pinching food from the kitchens while he’s at it.)

(And it is, it is doing Emma the world of good.)

( _“It’ll be okay, Emma, you’ll see.” “Whatever you say, Henry.”_ )

Emma tried not to play favourites with him, but maybe it was because he was always playing favourites with her. Emma had been seventeen the first time she’d run back to the orphanage, running away from the things she thought would be making her life better. (They hadn’t). He’d only been a few months old at the time, and when he cried through the night, weak and thin and underfed, she’d cried with him, aches of her own she shed under the shadow of his noise.

She had whispered words of comfort that she desperately wished someone would whisper back to her.

Emma tried not to play favourites, but if she could, she’d keep Henry all to herself, she’d take him away from the house and replace it with a home – but she could barely take care of herself.

So she let him stay, and she let him sleep with his head upon her legs.

And she let the fear that he would be next worm its way into her heart.

\---

It’s two weeks until she seems him again, the memory of his despondency a curious thing she’d tucked away. The curious thing wasn’t the despondency itself, that look was a buyer’s market all on its own these days: an excess of supply, a dearth of demand.

No, what was curious, was the way that that particular look set upon Killian’s face planted something heavy in the seat of her stomach. She didn’t like it.

There’s a crick in her neck that wakes her, a crick that’s been several weeks brewing against the floor of the upstairs room, and blinking awake she stops to see two men’s boots stretched out on the floor beside her, one slung over the other.

Emma sits up far too quickly, the confusion at seeing them shaking her awake, her head spinning a little.

It’s Killian.

“Good morning, Swan. Apple?”

She’s still blinking, eyelashes sticking and fluttering when he passes it to her, the pink and yellow fruit almost as large as his hand, but the first thing she notices is his smile is back. In fact, his smile is a little smug. The second thing she notices is that Mrs Nolan is already upstairs with them, hovering around, feeding those in bed with bits and pieces of fruit, slices of nectarines, and pitted plums, Henry trailing behind her, an orange quarter stuck in his teeth.

“And _where_ did you get that?” Her voice croaks a bit, still tired and sleepy, but the activity around her is enough to bring her to her senses, eyeing the large basket of fruits sitting on the other side of the man beside her.

“Ah, _that_ ,” he tosses the apple from one hand to the other, still looking incredibly pleased with himself. “A story for another time, perhaps.”

“You mean it’s inappropriate for young ears, don’t you?” Emma is too happy to see fresh food and little smiles that it comes out low, teasing, and altogether too warm.

(And if she’s happy to see him smiling again, she doesn’t admit it to herself.)

“I meant you, Emma, it’s quite an exciting tale, don’t want to give you more cause to swoon after me. It’s a warm day after all, wouldn’t want you fainting.”

She never thought she would be relieved to have him flirt with her again, to have him wink at her again, but there it is, forcing a smile out of her. It’s the best morning she’s had in ages, looking back around the room to see how the spirits of the children lift, even if their health doesn’t, and for once the light in the room feels tangible.

“Thank you.”

Killian’s smile is bold, but his eyes are all the usual signs of gentle regard and it’s much too hard to look away. She’s not looking for anything, not waiting or wanting – just looking. He breaks it, brandishing once more – with less drama, less flourish – the apple in his hand. Emma takes it willingly, biting into the skin in relief and – she almost laughs from the simplicity of it, of the way the sweet juice is such respite. She catches herself before she does, but it must show, and when she turns back to him, there is something more contemplative on his face.

She doesn’t doubt that his quest for fruit was a dramatic tale, Killian Jones knows more thieves and disreputable people than Emma would have thought lived in their few streets, and she wonders what kind of racketeering black market trade he’s started.

( _“What did you call it again, lad?” “Operation Nightingale!”_ )

He seemed to create just as much uproar and reputation in quarantine as he did in every other moment of his life.

Only this time, she’s happy to hear the rumours.

\---

Killian doesn’t leave. Not that night, not the next, not the night after that. Two more weeks pass and the man that used to come once in a blue moon never leaves.

And, it’s with great reluctance, that Emma admits to herself she likes him there.

He is one more steady presence in the house, one more stoic body to metaphorically lean on. She’s been told before she’s a bit prickly, and in all honesty, Emma had used it to her advantage, allowing herself an easy (safe) distance from others.

But the turnover in the room upstairs is far too high for her liking and every time a body leaves she feels as though a piece of herself goes with them. Not a piece of her heart, or a piece of her softness, but a piece of her shell, a shard of her resolve snapped and nailed to their coffins.

Because the warmth of that fruit-filled morning doesn’t last (not that she ever thought it would), in fact, it barely lasts the day.

And in the next few weeks the warmth does not return.

He catches her sometimes, late in the kitchens, wringing a battered tea towel in her hands, wringing her courage under control, struggling to reign in her fear. Killian’s always so hesitant at first when he finds her like this, his feet scuffing on the wooden floors as though attempting to see how much she’s willing to open up to him.

Which is usually not at all.

Usually, she tosses the towel to him, letting her skirts hit him as she moves past.

But sometimes her fear is a stronger contender for control.

“I’m sorry about your brother,” she tells him one night through tears that pool in her eyes.

“It’s alright, love.”

It’s not alright, she can see it on his face, the way he whispers the words, can feel it through the hand not quite touching her forearm.

“None of this is alright.”

Emma considers yelling it in front of him, considers raging as loudly as they all did that first day, the one that seems so, so, long ago. Her mouth drops open to do it, gaping, but – the expression on his face looks so downtrodden, so young, and unnecessarily guilty that she blurts out something else entirely.

“I’ve lost everyone, _you’ve_ lost everyone. Neal, Graham, Liam, Ana and Nicholas, August,” she means to stop, the names never stop, death hasn’t stopped. “Ruby, Lily, Johanna, Felix and Wendy and-“ Emma’s voice cracks and she gasps, heaving the words she’d let tumble out back in again, drawing in breath as well as grief. She hadn’t meant to let them out, they flew out too quickly before she could catch them.

Emma doesn’t give him a proper chance to respond, his hand tries to wrap around her wrist, but he’s far too close, the red around his eyes too visceral – she moves around him again, sending him a wordless, apologetic look before she leaves him standing alone in the kitchen without another word.

This time it’s her feet that scuff in the silence.

But Killian never leaves, and it helps.

(And the fisherman’s wife gets back out of bed.)

\---

The problem was that it hit so quickly.

One day he’s racing up the old stairs in front of her, the steps so narrow and his feet so small that he climbs them with ease, and the next day he’s trailing lethargically behind her.

One day he’s continuing to pick biscuits out of the jar when he thinks Mrs Nolan isn’t looking, the next he barely eats at all.

And Emma doesn’t see any of it. She should. She’s seen it a handful of times now the way that it hits almost in the space of an hour.

But she doesn’t. Doesn’t see it until she comes out of the kitchen one night to announce dinner and finds Henry in bed with a fever.

Scared doesn’t even begin to cover it.

\---

The funny thing is, the upstairs room is empty.

It was both a sign of horror, and a sign of hope, and although no one in the house dared to say it out loud, they were all wishing it would stay that way.

When Emma enters, clean, fresh bedding in her arms, the quiet of the room hits her with surprising force. It’s quiet, but the quiet is loud and she lets her feet fall heavily upon the floorboards, soles of her slippers scuffing intentionally, clumsily. The bedding is tossed unceremoniously onto one of the corner beds, the one nearest the fire, and she moves almost angrily to poke at the doleful flame with intentional clangour.

The silence is too thick, too high upon her neck.

She makes noise simply to hear noise.

Simply to hear something other than how death lingers in the room.

And how there used to be noise.

She is too busy making the noise to hear him come up behind her. Emma nearly backs into him, but he catches her, his hands reflexively moving to halt her in her stumble and do not retreat once she’d steady.

(Well, as steady as she can be.)

The dying flame flickers harshly on his face, a depressing contrast of shadow and yet it looks soft, all knit brows and Autumn chill. He doesn’t bother smiling at her, but his head cocks with a softened twitch of his mouth, the once cheerful wrinkles that live among his eyes, now deep grooves of grief. He shouldn’t look younger like this, he just shouldn’t, the quietness in the house – in the street, in the quarantine – should make him look as old as she feels.

But it doesn’t. The sadness that makes Emma feel as though she’s lived too long only makes him look smaller.

He looks as though he has no idea what to do in that way that children don’t, and Emma truly doesn’t know either.

The cross that hangs around his neck, the one she’d seen him clutching both with an absent mind and a present one, sits in the collars of the shirt he wears all dishevelled and improper. Maybe that’s why looks younger, his coat long gone, his white shirt is riddled with creases. He looks nothing like a self-proclaimed gentleman.

(Not that he ever did, not with that swagger.)

Propriety has long been damned here.

It is hard to think of propriety when family is a forgotten construct and Death is a reigning victor.

Her fingers shake as she reaches for it, gripping heavily his talisman.

“Does it do you any good?”

She wanted to make noise, to show the silence and the Devil that they were not welcome – her voice didn’t get the message, and its volume crumbles in her throat.

“It was a gift, from someone far more religious than myself – so, in a way, yes.”

He matches her tone, but his hand slips gently down the length of her arm without the usual hesitation. Killian pulls her fingers from the necklace around his neck, until his own fingers curl around the bootlace that lives upon her wrist. He thumbs it, quietly reverent of the memory of an almost-love that she wears.

“And you, love?”

Emma can feel it, that bubble in her throat, the one telling her that her stoicism will soon be all for naught, the one too big for the space in her mouth. She chooses instead to focus on the way his fingers move from her wrist to squeeze gently at her fingers.

But the movement is gentle and gentleness makes no noise and all she can hear is the silent crackle of the fire beside them.

Three months ago the house had been full. Three months ago, the upstairs room in which they were now standing had been noisy, sounds of tiny feet, and larger laughter from working, _healthy_ , lungs. At the time, the noise had felt too much, had felt too much like the anxiety and the heavy fear and the noise of that first day beating against the drums of her ears.

She knew now – unreservedly – which day was worse, and it wasn’t that first day. It was every day after.

Oh, how she wished dearly for that first one back.

How she wished for the brown-eyed boy downstairs to have just stayed downstairs. How she wished Henry had been more specific with his reassurance that they would all be okay in the end.

Wished he’d told her if he meant himself.

If he meant her.

Or if he meant Killian.

“I’m sorry, Emma.”

She looks at him long and hard before she does it, and she’d be lying if she said she did it of her own volition. (Nothing these days is of her own doing). She does it because Death is at her back, nipping at her heels, nipping at the heels of her heart and every time he nips a little closer Emma jumps, she jumps in fear, she jumps forward.

But this time he’s closer on her heels, this time he’s bitten uncomfortably close, and Emma jumps more than she has before.

Emma jumps and kisses Killian – propriety be damned.

Kissing him is almost exactly as she’d imagined, and nothing like it. She’s prepared for the way _he_ feels – the caress of his lips, the stubble of his light beard – but she’s not prepared for how _she_ feels. She feels the heat rush to her cheeks, feels it flood her head with blood and dizziness, she feels his fingers in hers tighten and feels the others nestle in her hair.

She feels lost. But largely found, upside down and right-way-up, a ridiculous chorale of feelings.

(Not that she’d thought of it much, not that he’d been so in her space for months that the thought of touching him occurred to her almost every time. Not that she was scared.

She was definitely scared – only now there was one thing she was more scared of.)

Emma’s heartstrings tremble a little when she deepens the kiss, two of their hands slowly unwinding, his teeth nab at her in response.

It’s not as soft and timid as she knows it should be, not when his hand winds itself around her back, and she knows what they say about him, of his lust for violence and thievery and women. None of it seems to matter when it’s been him by her side these long weeks, stubborn determination hand in hand with her own.

It’s not enough though, it doesn’t seem to matter how many times his nose careens with hers, nor how tightly she holds his face to hers, she’s scared and she just can’t seem to stop jumping.

Emma jumps again, her fingers sliding, following the buttons of his vest, down, down, to the waist of his trousers, trying to untuck the linen of his shirt.

Killian’s fingers find hers again to stop her, drawing her away from her objective, drawing away from her kiss, but leaning his forehead against hers, their lips hovering just above temptation.

“Emma, stop,” he’s out of breath, he’s out of sorts. It’s a warning, a reminder that he wants to be a gentleman, a plea to mean more than her grief. “I don’t need –“

She knows what he wants it to mean.

She knows because she feels the same.

“What if it’s what I need?”

She can feel him hesitating, more than just physically, the weight of his fingers around hers, the tensing of his body.

“And what if I need this to be more than that?” His words are scared because he’s scared, Emma’d be crazy not to notice, she’d be crazy not to feel it in the drag and pull of his lips against hers.

“I know, Killian, I just – we’ve lost everyone.“ She’s trying to be bold, trying be loud, but her voice just can’t seem to creep above a whisper, and when she whispers her confession, for all its quiet it is louder than any noise she could have thought to make.

“I- I can’t lose you, too.”

He jumps too. Jumps back to her lips, hands back to her face, and jumps into a purposeful, overpowering kiss. It’s heavy, and it’s intoxicating and Emma curses it at the same time as desperately seeking out more.

It’s not as soft and as timid as she knows it should be.

But Emma doesn’t care.

She tears the shirt from his pants with more impatience than is lady-like, his vest and shirt unbuttoned hastily, pulled over his head, and reaching the floor before her shoes do. It may not be soft, and there is nothing gentle about the way the heat burns her, the way he kisses and traces paths on her jaw, her skin, with his lips and his hands, but it tortuously affectionate.

It settles something in her, or awakens something – whatever it is sits uncomfortably in her chest, sharp and yet out of place.

He hesitates only once more when she attempts to pull him with her as she stumbles backwards, lips tugging his with her.

She had unthinkingly tried to pull him towards the bed nearest them, her sleeves slipping from her shoulder where his fingers are seeking skin, and he halts – halts his lips underneath her ear, halts his feet.

There are two beds in this room, two beds and two more mattresses, but the last people to sleep in them…

They use the big table instead, shuffling their feet with them as they go, chairs scraping against the floor in their haste to make space.

For all their fumbling, desperate movements, their limbs don’t even tangle, the whole thing is somehow synchronised. The laces of her corset however, the cream embroidered one that she favours best, proves difficult for even his supposedly expert hands to unwind. But his hands are shaking a little and his ears are flushed red even in the dark, and she finds herself wondering just how many of the whispers have credence, how many times these fingers have found themselves in women’s clothing. He’s not looking at her, far too focused on yanking on her laces, pulling on them roughly with an incredibly wind-swept look on his face.

(She knows the feeling, the air has been knocked about her as well.)

Their hearts should chatter, their limbs should snag on each other, especially with the way their breathing is so untempered, but the only thing that snags is the way he just can’t seem to get the damn thing off.

Emma would laugh, but she doesn’t have it in her, kissing his cheek and lingering there as he struggles.

But they don’t fumble awkwardly otherwise. The corset finally comes off with a relieved gasp from her, and a muttered complaint from him (“ _about bloody time”_ ) before it finds its own place on the floor, and with it her skirts and the last of their preamble.

A hand in her hair drags her lips back to his, tongue sneaking back into play, and Emma, well – the rumours were an excuse. She couldn’t care less where he’s been, except that where he’s been for weeks and weeks is in this house – with her.

It is a perfectly timed rush, Emma’s remaining underclothes pooling about her as she practically jumps on the wooden ledge, revealing more and more of her skin in the process - but then, his pants never fully make it to the ground either. And they are a dishevelled mess of emotions, perfectly symbolic in their half dressed state, his trousers half way down, her torso in the cold night air.

It doesn’t seem to matter when his hands, hardened and kind, touch each inch of her that bares, feeling for the places that the poor light will not show him – every curved edge, every peak, every thigh.

Her skin is treated with a delicacy that her clothes apparently did not deserve.

And still his face is so serious, so soft and overwhelming (no matter how hard he kisses her) that she can’t help but tear herself away from it because it pulls too much at her, makes her – she doesn’t want to use the word yearn, it sounds too much like hoping for something and hope has lost all meaning here. She does not want to hope, does not want to set her heart on anything.

(Set her heart on anyone.

It’s never worked before.)

With anyone else this might feel brazen, the way she pulls his hips to hers to distract herself from the feelings he wears on his face, her legs twisting behind him, encouraging further. With anyone else this might feel wrong. Anyone else might make her feel strangely for the way she nips faintly at his cheek once more, nose scraping against scruff, but he merely responds by rocking leisurely between her legs where she wants him.

She almost berates him for teasing her – none of this is about patience. They are in a rush, in a haste to touch, to taste, to feel, to _feel alive_.

(To escape Death walking behind them.)

His fingertips dance underneath her thighs, her own planted firmly in the hair on his chest, and he waits for something (for her, maybe, or for himself). But then he’s in, easing himself and holding his breath at the same time with a slide that makes her fidgety, makes her widen her legs.

It’s been a while since she’s done this but none of that seems to matter when their motions start, an easy back and forth of hips, a pace that increases in tempo as it increases in confidence.

(There are so many things that matter and so many that don’t.)

She can’t seem to let go of him, her hands rapacious, finding purchase from his shoulders and his neck. Emma’s perched on the edge – the edge of the table, the edge of despair, the edge of rapture – but there’s a steady fierceness with which he kisses her, the way that one hand curls under her thigh and the other around her head that keeps her aware of absolutely everything about him.

And that is the opposite of what she wanted.

She wanted this to erase.

Emma feels as though she is drunk on the feeling of him. Off-balance, vision slightly blurred, slurring as she tries to mutter his own name to him. She had wanted to drink him in, and stay in that happy tipsy limbo. But just like alcohol, the thrill of him pushing into her over and over with the hand splayed on her spine turns to sober contemplation.

And bitter realisation.

She wanted to lose herself in how he would make her feel – in her bones, in her head, in her heart – as though he were alcohol himself and erase the fear that he too would join the numbered dead. It was supposed to erase everything but the things that told her he was very much alive.

(That they both were.)

It hadn’t done that at all. It was supposed to pull her from where they were, the morbidly quiet orphanage, the boy barely breathing downstairs. With every thrust and drag of him, with every time her head fell to his shoulder, breathing in the quiet ginger of him through the gasp of an open mouth, she found herself jolted further and further from escape.

She’d come to need him too much, she feared the unknown of their immediate futures too much. (Their days were numbered). Killian is panting and keening in her ear, and she doesn’t want him to go – nor to let go – doesn’t want him to leave her like they all do.

And her thoughts are consumed with death.

There is no escape.

(And if there is, she will not find it with him.)

The pit in her chest has a name, and it begins to hurt.

The tears come unasked for and without warning as she gasps for another reason entirely, for the way he shuffles forward a bit more, changing the angle.

“Emma…”

Killian’s pace falters, concern written in the shadow of his face as he watches the silent tears well and trickle – but Emma shakes her head veraciously pulling him back to her lips, kissing him through a muttered reassurance that it’s alright, to keep going.

He’s reluctant and she can’t blame him, but she’s thankful that he obeys.

There is no bite to the way he kisses her back. No, it is gentle action as well as intention this time, no frantic rush, a touch of noses and lips in quicker, unhurried succession. It is quiet and heavy like the room. He gives her a shaky smile in return when he pulls back, one that flickers with the subtle shaking the adrenalin is giving him.

It hurts him as much as it hurts her.

Killian listens, just as he always has, his hands running down her sides, thumbs running over her breasts and then around and down into the gathering of her clothes, hitching her further into him with the grasp of her, suddenly driving a sharper and faster if somewhat softer pace. He tries to soothe her with what she went looking for in the first place, unknowing that he’s only making it worse.

And it feels good – it does – to kiss him, to have him so close to her, to be with him. The feeling twists restlessly in her chest with every movement, a helix rolling low in her stomach, one that makes her legs twitch without asking them to. She didn’t mean to start crying, it had just happened, his hands too comforting, the feeling too much, her heart too heavy, his face too… something.

(Too loving.)

Under any other circumstance the feeling, the rising pleasure in her body, wouldn’t hurt. But it does, because the house is quiet, and their breathing rebounds in the dreary space, and she can’t help thinking he’ll be next, that the feel of him all-encompassing around her is temporary.

In that moment, she is a glutton for punishment, needing the thing that scares her the most.

( _“Emma, don’t think so much.”_

But that’s not the problem, the problem is she’s feeling too much.)

The tears burn on her cheeks, the heat of them clashing with the flush of her skin, sweat gathering in the creases of her knees, and the temples of her brow. Killian kisses one of the tears away, leaving moisture when he takes moisture away, his nose pressing and tilting her head a little with the action.

Emma finds comfort, however little, that there is at least some felicity in this.

The pleasure and pain, however, it cramps within her, a constriction of everything she’s thinking and feeling. It screeches through her begging for attention as his breathing gets heavier, her hands anchoring in the locks of his hair holding his face to hers, foreheads finding balance with each other.

He keeps pushing her, higher and harder (just like he always has), that old forgotten coil that twists uncomfortably in her as it torments and spikes, another small, muffled sound creeps from the back of her throat and –

She trips over the edge first, though not by much, with his fingers on her back and down upon the nerves where they’re joined, lips hovering above his own. His face is as red as hers, tinted and the good kind of feverish, eyelashes fluttering as he loses himself foolishly inside her with a few last movements, in and out and in – and foolishly with his vulnerability on full display in the firelight.

(There is no escape.)

Killian pulls out but not away, showing no intention of breaking the moment, but Emma’s arms are still around his neck. A calm settles over them, shrouding them in darkness, and stillness and uneven breathing. It’s the first time that Emma has considered the quiet a respite rather than a curse.

But maybe part of it is that she’s shut her eyes, and refuses to open them (and some of it is definitely the high from having sex). She knows that when she will open them she will see the tenderness on his face, the sadness of the room, the darkness of the world. So she doesn’t open them, not even when his hands cradle her face, thumbs wiping at the rivers of dwindling tears that mark her cheeks.

“Don’t worry – I’m a survivor, love.”

She does open her eyes at that, curiosity meeting honest intention. Through her tears she tries to laugh, but it’s congested in her chest and carries no sound she’s ever associated with laughter.

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

He simply replies by curling his fingers under her jaw, kissing her with a drowsy passion, and all Emma can do is sigh and hold onto him for dear _life_.

\---

She falls asleep that night on the floor beside Henry’s bed, just as she has every night – upright, unsettled, unhappy.

Only this time Killian leans against her, her head upon his shoulder, and Emma holds someone’s hand again – his.

\---

The end of that week is plain and simply unbelievable.

Emma at a loss for words, tears once again coating her cheeks, running down her chin and with no sign of abating, making the hair at her neck stick. Her heart feels like it has stopped, just when she didn’t think she could do it again, not with another person in town, not with another person she cared for, not with _Henry_.

She cries. Loudly. Her breathing is barely breathing and is more hiccups of repudiation.

Killian’s hand is at her back as she sobs, the room filled with those few who remain, come to stare at Henry in shock.

None of them expected him to get back out of bed.

It was not unheard of, it had happened once or twice in the sea of many – some people just got better. Some managed to get out of bed, some managed to find themselves strong once more, and healthy, the sickly paleness gone from their cheeks. And it was rare.

Emma just never imagined it would happen to them.

(Had never expected something so good and so fortunate to happen to her.)

So she cries, her arms around him as he mumbles an ‘I told you so’ into her hair.

And a smile on her face.

\---

She should have listened to them both.

Emma should have known they’d both be right, the only two men she knew strong enough to stick by her – that they would be alright, that they would survive.

When the walls come down, the barricades torn down so abruptly and without so much as a warning, barely anyone comes out to watch it – but they do. Emma does, a hand in each of hers, one small and one large. There are no shouts for joy, no mutterances of festive chatter or relieved celebration – they are people with a grudge, people with more resentment than they know what to do with.

They are people with quiet ghosts breathing down their necks, they are silent malcontent.

The last day is definitely worse than the first, and Emma can’t believe she ever entertained the thought that it wouldn’t be.

They were both laden with chaos, they were just different sorts, thrumming noise and terrible silence.

But at least, the last day was the last day; at least there was an end to it.

And at least Emma’s not alone when it comes.

**Author's Note:**

> This was a fic I wrote for my darling Chinx for her birthday a year ago today, and I've been meaning to slowly update my AO3 with old stories, so figured now was as good a time as any to post this one :)


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